Getting it together as race traitors

“Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.” (Ursula Le Guin)

White people in North America don’t know what racism is – how it feels, what it does to Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s lives, what it means to live entire lives resisting it. We’re part of racist systems, structures, and practices, and we can perceive some of what they do, but because of how white people are placed and formed inside this particular death machine, we can’t really know it. White supremacists know a lot about how to mobilize and practice racism. And white people who are trying to work against racism can learn a lot about what whiteness is, what it has been, and how to fight it, and we should! I’ve seen so many white friends working on this knowing sharing various five-point lists, like this one, offering good points about social media posts well-intentioned white women should resist, or this one from SURJ with ways white people can show up to combat white supremacist violence. Many of my white friends wonder how to go beyond five-point lists, what to do after they read the books listed on any of a thousand google docs listing resources for white people, after they donate money to people targeted by white supremacy, after they write to their elected representatives, and what it really means to “organize our own,” rather than expecting racialized people to do that work for us. Many of us are coming to see that knowing is only half the battle, and it’s barely a fraction of the war.

For white people in particular right now, forming and participating in collective organizing is our best approach to fighting racism. It matters for sure to intervene as individuals in ways that disrupt white supremacy – putting our bodies between the cops and the Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour they target, calling one another in, educating ourselves, redistributing the money we have unjustly received, and so on. Many of the things we do that refuse our privilege knapsack are useful, and may contribute to what were formulated in the journal of the same name as “race traitor” activities. Today we think of race traitor behaviors as acting as accomplices, not bystanders.

Joel Olson helped to theorize race traitor politics. His gravestone reads: “What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?” This is a good question for all of us. And yet, precisely because of the ways that whiteness operates to make us believe we are individuals unconnected to the social world, we white people might tend to try to answer that question by thinking that the most damage we can do is to really know and understand how messed up the world is and how shameful our whiteness is. We might think that the most important things to do are to express our confusion on social media, increase our understanding of the harms of racism, or voice our determination to be different.

None of these things express the most damage white people can do to the racial order and the rule of capital right now. They are all, and only, what we can do as individuals. Nothing we do as individuals can match what we can do together. And yet, the bridge from “learning about things on the internet” to “working collectively to organize our people” is a bit shaky and not as obvious as it should be. And if the most damage we can do is collective, which it really is, we should make that bridge between “me” and “we” obvious, firm, and accessible. I follow white antiracists of the past, such as Mab Segrest, in believing that real race treason demands collective forms to be effective, sustained, and responsible.

I’m part of a small anarchist collective, one that has made a deliberate decision to try to build social infrastructure to support collective resistance in our city. We do things like host an evolving organizing guide with specific resources for Ottawa, put out a weekly list of radical events that we hope will help people connect with organizing and education that’s happening even if they aren’t part of a social scene or on social media, and collectively write things (including this history of racist police violence in Ottawa that I wish were not really relevant right now but is).

A couple of years ago, we did a bunch of work on how people can organize collectives, and why it’s good to do political work in an organized, mutually supportive, and mutually accountable form. We think of this as “Getting It Together.” We wrote up an article, made the curriculum for the workshop available for anyone who wanted to offer it, and have done a couple of audio interviews about it. All of that is here, and maybe most of what I want to say here is: If you are wondering how to do collective work against racism right now, there are resources to help you! As we wrote back in 2018, “This is a moment of significant opportunity. Thousands of people are mobilizing for the first time, or rejoining the struggle after some time away. We firmly believe that well-organized collectives can contribute to resilient left infrastructure that will help us find one another, share knowledge and experience, stick it out over the long haul, and grow large-scale, formidable movements.” This rings true for me today.

In the conclusion to her three-volume meditation on enslavement and complicated freedom, written (of course) for young adults, Ursula Le Guin stages a reflection on collectivity through a character who is enslaved and wins his freedom. Reflecting on the impossibility of trust in relations between enslaved people and enslavers, he realizes, “Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.” We live today in a world without justice. And as the slogan says, without justice, there can be no peace. But because this world contains so much love, I do think we can build relationships that collectively bend toward justice. I really hope we white people get it together to help in that project.

Unclean eating for #settlervegans

I think of Brecht’s poem “To those who follow in our wake.” One stanza says:

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!
But how can I eat and drink
When I take what I eat from the starving
And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?
And yet I eat and drink.

Written in 1939, in exile from Germany, Brecht’s context is profoundly different than ours. And yet, when he writes: “I ate my food between slaughters/I laid down to sleep among murderers/I tended to love with abandon” I find that he speaks to questions that remain current. Brecht’s answer to the question But how can I eat and drink/ When I take what I eat from the starving/ And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?: Make trouble for the rulers. When you are betrayed to the slaughterer, hope that your death causes them to sit easier on their throne – which is to say, while we dwell in this life of eating and drinking although (and sometimes because) others starve and thirst, make rulers sit on that throne with less ease.

I think we can make trouble for our rulers through turning our attention to what it would take to answer the question how should we eat. This re-orientation starts with shifting to a relational understanding of consumption. I follow Lisa Heldke in this productive shift from substance ontologies to relational ontologies in thinking about food. She argues that many of our ethical decisions about food come down to what are in effect substance ontologies – that some particular thing is to be eaten, or not eaten, and the “eatability” quotient depends on the characteristics of the thing in question. As Heldke notes, substance ontologies give us a lot of traction on individual decision making – they can have a kind of clarity of classification, and their epistemic demands are fairly mild. So, if you have decided for reasons to not eat meat, all you need to know is if some given food contains it to decide whether or not you’ll eat it. In thinking about the specifically ethical and political dimensions of what to eat, Heldke notes that substance ontologies are less helpful. Asking why you eat or don’t eat meat opens the question of how to decide which animals suffer, why we attend primarily to mega-fauna, what considerations show up aiming to present further global warming, and how to assess the comparative needs to beings involved in food systems. Heldke also suggests that there is a kind of moral absolutism frequently bundled with substance ontologies that actively gets in the way of attending to the relations involved in making something food. As she writes:

Food, in particular, is deeply relational—by definition. To be food is to be (defined as) something that can be eaten by something else, and eating is, of course, a relationship. But the relational character of food extends far beyond the stage at which it is actually consumed. To become food—to be rendered edible, palatable, delicious—means that a living thing has been part of scores of relationships, both natural and cultural: with the soil in which a plant is grown and the sun and rain that enable its growth; with the factory workers who process a raw material for market; with the heat and the metal pan that turn an ingredient into a “dish” in someone’s home. In industrialized society, foods are the products of extremely long and complex sets of relationships (Heldke 83).

Thinking about all food choices as relational, as “with-y,” in Heldke and Raymond Boisvert’s terms, constellates them as congealed relations; this orientation opens ethical and political questions so that we can consider our responsibilities to a much broader and more complex web of interconnections.

Immediately, a relational ontology unsticks previously frozen decision making; instead of judging the ethical and political relationships of consumption based on the substances being consumed, we can ask about the relationships congealed or enacted in the consumption. We’re not eating things, we’re participating in relationships, and how responsibility to those relationships unfolds is contextual. The context and meaning-making of consumption is situated in relation not only to the distribution of power, harm, benefit, and more as it’s practiced in the present; that context is also a trace of the history that shapes the material conditions of eating, drinking, and so on.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s short story “Circles Upon Circles” describes a Nishnaabeg mom, who has been out gathering wild rice with her family; as they put the canoe on the car and start to leave her settler partner gets into a discussion with some fellow settlers who would prefer to have a beach on the lake, rather than the shallow waters that wild rice plants need to grow. The narrator reflects:

They want a beach. We want the rice beds. You can’t have both. They want to win. We need to win. They’ll still be white people if they don’t have the kind of beach they want. Our kids won’t be Missisaugua if they can’t ever do a single Missisaugua thing. (Simpson 78)

Substance ontologies focus on the rice; is it good or bad to eat local, wild-harvested rice? Relational ontologies look at the context in which rice is tended, harvested, related with, and the web of historical and present relationships that make up what we are. And these relational ontologies are not fixed by, for example, categories like “Indigenous” and “settler,” nor do Indigenous practices of relationality with hunted animals translate to settler practices of eating factory-farmed meat. As Margaret Robinson has argued about veganism and Mi’Kmaq legends, there are specific contexts in which animals are understood as offering themselves as a sacrifice so that others can live. As she says,

The values obtained from an ecofeminist exegesis of Mi’kmaq stories can serve as a starting point for an Indigenous veganism. The personhood of animals, their self-determination, and our regret at their death, all show that choosing not to ask for their sacrifice is a legitimately Aboriginal option. (193)

She continues:

Because Aboriginal people are the targets of genocide, the cultural practices we adopt or reject are vitally important…Some may argue that the embodiment of Mi’kmaq values into new practices, such as veganism, is not a legitimate development, and may even threaten the ways our treaty rights are assessed by others. Yet those who value only the preservation of an unchanging tradition join with the colonial powers in seeing no place for contemporary Indigeneity. There is more to our culture and to our relationship with the land, particularly as women, than hunting and killing animals (193).

Robinson compellingly shows that relationships – to culture, oral history, land, animal relations, and more – are both situated in relation to their history and malleable, undetermined. Conceptions of relational ontologies may help settlers understand both that it is possible to be in relations of consumption without purity and that no relation is transferable. Instead, relationships are situated and personal, collectively shaped and intimate. Taking a relational ontology approach changes the conversation we’re having about what we should eat; it invites us to clarify the stakes and reasons we’re making one decision and not another.

At a stroke, white settler vegans can stop asking whether Indigenous people should eat that seal meat, let them tend their own relations, and turn instead to asking what relations we are placed within when we make food choices. And at the same stroke, white settler omnivores can stop talking about Indigenous people thanking the deer for offering his life to the hunter as they bite into a fish burger made from tilapia imported from China.

This turn from substance to relational ontologies intensifies rather than resolves the contradictions and imperfections associated with consumption. Or, perhaps it is better to say that it refuses the lie that there is any way to eat or drink that is free from suffering. In practice, I would say that few vegans actually believe that eating vegan frees them completely from implication in relations of suffering. There are, though, the self-righteous few, such as a colleague who eats vegan and believes that everyone should adopt it as a lifestyle, advocating for example for a departmental policy that all food served at colloquia will be vegan and critiquing people who eat animal products or wear leather or wool. This colleague feeds her many cats chicken, which is completely appropriate and necessary to being a good nurturer of obligate carnivore animal companions. So in practice, although she is avowing a substance ontology, she is enacting a relational ontology, in which she holds her own behavior to one standard but respects the boundaries of her companion animals’ needs. I believe being honest about these kinds of relational decisions liberates us from hypocrisy and a particular form of performative virtue signaling; it may also be a kinder way to get on together.

A relational ontology of eating invites us to perceive the act of eating as only one nodal point in a distributed web of connection and co-constitution, consumption and waste management. Instead of taking the boundaries of our bodies or of the substances we take in as the source of the answer for how we should eat, we can turn outward to look at the conditions of the production of food – what relations are nourished in the soil when things are grown in one way or another? Whose hands tend the plants, and what are the conditions of their lives? Who processes the substances that become food? How is the waste generated by that processing handled? Where does the water that nourishes the animals and plants in their growing process come from? Where does it go? What microbes are encouraged to proliferate by which practices of using low-dose antibiotics in feed of various sorts? What are the practices of sewage management that handle the material afterlife of our eating – do we shit into drinking water that then needs to be treated? What are the carbon costs of consuming food that is shipped long distances versus eating foods grown in heated or cooled greenhouses nearby?

Frequently we won’t know the answers to these questions. But if we learn a little about the conditions of food production at industrial scales we might make policies that look like substance decisions, but which actually track our best approximation of holding relations in view. So we can do an analysis of what the costs and effects of one eating decision or another are, and use particular agential cuts as our guides. “Eating local” might be a synonym for “I try not to eat food grown in drought-ridden areas stealing water from diminishing aquifers and processed by people living in conditions of agricultural slavery.” But, of course, local food wherever we are is frequently tended by people who are precarious workers experiencing tremendous harm in their work. As with any cut, this will be a limited and impure decision. Oddly, holding a relational ontology in view as one of our guidelines for asking how we should eat allows us to recognize that there is only, ever, unclean eating. We cannot get it right, we will always cause other beings to suffer and die in order for us to live, and we cannot individually solve the scale of problems given us simply by living on this earth, nourishing our bodies and excreting waste.

Claiming Bad Kin

This is the first part of a talk I’m offering today at McMaster – access copy here.

Many white people I know have been sparked to reflection in the wake of the “not guilty” verdicts in the Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier murder cases. Some have been moved to ask what it means to be a white settler in this place currently called Canada, confronting the murders of Coulton Boushie, Tina Fontaine, and so many others. When we understand what is happening, wherever we notice it, many of us respond by wanting to distance ourselves from harm, or by denying that it’s really so bad, or by attempting to be firmly on the side of the angels. In particular, those of us who benefit from harm and wrong-doing may want to take the side of the oppressed, the murdered, the wounded. We may respond by disavowing our connection to the people killing the earth and its people, critters, and ecosystems. In some real way I love this response, this rejection of being complicit with harm. I think it signals a lively and laudable rejection of wrongdoing that we can all get behind, and a desire to transform or end the social relations that produce suffering. But precisely because the complicity-denial impulse expresses a wish to end suffering we ought to assess whether denying complicity is an effective political stance.

In this talk I’ll be primarily focusing on whiteness in its articulation with the past and present of colonialism, Black enslavement, and border militarism. But it is vital to mark that all of this takes place and is complexly entangled with environmental devastation, global warming, and the spread of industrial toxicants alongside everyday vitalized materials that capitalism renders pollutants. And all of this rests on a eugenic logic that dictates who deserves to live and who to die and that threads disability-hating throughout its narrative of fitness of species. People who benefit from social relations of harm frequently try to claim kin relations with the people who are targeted by racism or to reject kin connections with wrongdoers. Many white settlers respond to histories of colonization by claiming Indigenous ancestry, or to histories of enslavement by claiming abolitionist ancestry or by remaining ignorant of enslavers in the family tree, or we respond to histories of border militarism by naturalizing or celebrating contemporary state formations. Many white settlers mobilize individualizing and neoliberal logics, that is, to deny complicity with or benefit from ongoing social relations of harm that result from colonization, chattel slavery, and militarized borders.

Christina Sharpe’s piece “Lose Your Kin” came out shortly after the US election of Donald Trump. The article begins with a quote from Saidiya Hartman’s book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route: “Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship.” Hartman’s project in Lose Your Mother is to trace what happens when someone cannot find the traces, the names, the histories of history they know is present and shapes their lives. Sharpe’s project in “Lose Your Kin” is to invite white people to refuse white kinship and to recognize that, as she writes, “One must be willing to say this is abhorrent. One must be willing to be more than uncomfortable. Once must be willing to be on the outside. One must refuse to repair a familial rift on the bodies cast out as not kin” (Sharpe 2016, para 10). She is right, I think, to argue that “Kinship relations structure the nation. Capitulation to their current configurations is the continued enfleshment of that ghost [of slavery]” (para 11). In this inquiry into what it means to resist the continued enfleshment of the ghosts and present hauntings of slavery, eugenic projects, the violence of borders, and colonialism, I pivot to ask if refusing to capitulate to current configurations might require acknowledging our social and political entanglement with them.

I am interested in what it could mean for white people and settlers more generally who benefit from historical and current effects of enslavement, colonialism, border militarism, racial distributions of environmental devastation, and capitalism to claim kin with the people producing these effects. If we are complicit in the pain of this suffering world, how might we take responsibility for our bad kin? I started thinking about this question in part through listening to conversations over the past several years about people who claim various sorts of Indigenous identities without being able to trace their family history to the lived, community experience of indigeneity. One articulation of why this move doesn’t work came from Kim Tallbear’s important work on why DNA tests cannot confirm or deny Indigenous identity. She says, “We construct belonging and citizenship in ways that do not consider these genetic ancestry tests. So it’s not just a matter of what you claim, but it’s a matter of who claims you” (“Sorry, That DNA Test Doesn’t Make You Indigenous” 2017). Audra Simpson, speaking of the case of author Joseph Boyden, wrote:

this conversation has never been about Indian status, or blood quantum, it is simply a matter of kin. Do settlers understand what it means to be a relation to each other? And the crucial relationship of this relatedness to one’s society, to politics, to land? The settler state does, that’s why it took our children from us and dismantled our kinship systems with the Indian Act in 1876. So we hold on to our kin relations where we can and we reclaim them as we can. We understand kin very well indeed. .. It is not shameful to ask who you belong to. It is not “lateral violence” or a lynch mob to ask who your relations are. It is the beginning of a conversation that unlocks who you are and how you shall proceed with each other.” (“Eksá:’a Onekwenhtara on Twitter: ‘Mic. DROP. All Hail the IroQueen. Https://T.Co/QedwCGBSAq’” 2017).

It seems to me clear that, indeed, it does not only matter what we claim about who we are; it matters who claims us as kin.

White nationalists claim me, as a white person, as kin. Though they may not know me personally and though they would likely despair of my politics, they are working for a world in which I and white people like me hold citizenship, reproduce “the white race,” and are safe and flourishing. Listening to Tallbear and Simpson, and reflecting on Sharpe’s work, I started to wonder what would happen if I claimed them back.

My argument here has three parts. First, I argue that Indigenous practices of relationality cannot be taken up by settlers, and that instead we must craft new practices of being in relation that can destroy settler colonialism and its articulation with anti-Black racism and border militarism. Second, I forward a conception of situatedness as arising from both the histories we inherit and the webs of connection that shape the social relations within which we exist; differential inheritance produces differential responsibilities. Third, I argue for a specific form of responding to whiteness that involves white settlers claiming rather than disavowing our connection to white supremacist people and social relations. I explore the potential of the roles of friends and comrades working as race traitors against whiteness and gesture towards the importance of directly confronting white supremacists.

Is it white shame?

Shame feels awful. It can feel like we want to crawl out of our skin, erase ourselves from the world, find someone else who’s the real problem. Feeling shame can be twisting desperately away from something that is inside us, having something on us that we can’t wash off, being something that we hate and that disgusts us that we can’t not be.

Shame is different than guilt. Guilt is the experience of realizing that we did something wrong – personally, we acted badly. This can be that we messed up, or we were mean, or not careful, or didn’t follow through on something. Some significant part of the time, when we feel guilty we can personally take responsibility and there is some chance that we can make things right or work on repair. Most of the time, shame is not about an individual action; it’s not some particular thing we did wrong that we could apologize for. Shame is more often about something we are. That’s why it’s so sticky and hard, and also why white people should embrace shame about whiteness. First, a few caveats.

Politically, mostly, we should burn shame down. We feel shame for things that are glorious and beautiful and not shameful at all. Think about when we feel shame for our fat bodies, our queer love, our working class culture, our disabled existence, our spiritual practices, our wrinkles, our not knowing something yet, our mistakes even though we’re trying hard, realizing we hurt someone we love. Probably everyone I know has experienced feeling shame or being shamed for something that is not shameful. We’re right to reject shame wholesale a lot of the time, right to say that we have nothing to hide, that we are good and worthy and deserve love and dignified existence and joy. Because that’s true.

Other experiences of shame congeal around heritage, history, family, religion, ethnic or racial group. People are shamed for where they come from, what’s happened to their people in history, who their family is, their language, their past. Suddenly, and this is hard to identify because of how bad shame feels and how appropriate it is so much of the time to refuse it, suddenly sometimes it’s absolutely imperative for us to stay with shame. So I’m talking now to white people in the US and Canada.

Feeling shame for whiteness past

The ghost of whiteness past is with us in the present. It’s our inheritance. We meet this ghost when we learn about the history of genocide and colonization on this continent; we meet it when we begin to understand how many people were murdered, how much land was stolen, how many Indigenous children were taken from their families and places and forced to not speak their language, how much water and soil was poisoned. We meet this ghost when we start to know how these places were built through the bodies and blood of enslaved people. Or when we ride a train through tunnels that still have the bones of indentured Chinese labourers who died working the railroad. Or when we understand what colonialism was, and how it connected with distributing money. I could go on nearly endlessly. Anywhere you look in the bloody past, you’ll find white people on the side of devastating and destroying other people for the sake of whiteness.

I know this isn’t simple. The people who became white through coming to what is now Canada and the United States often weren’t personally trying to do horrible things – they were often driven out of their homes and places, hungry, looking for a place to live and be. The people in the more recent past who defended or produced segregation or tried to abolish Indigenous identity or who tried to keep immigrants out of the country had their reasons too. This is one thing about whiteness; not being personally culpable doesn’t mean that we’re not involved and can’t be responsible. When I’ve taught classes about these histories, I’ve had students come up to me and say “I don’t know how to live in the world, now that I know these things.” Sometimes they say, “I feel angry to learn these things, because it’s not my fault. I didn’t do these things.”

White shame is the feeling we white people might have when we look back at the past and recognize all the horror that has been done for whiteness and by white people to others. We didn’t do those things ourselves, personally, so the feeling we have isn’t really guilt. But we recognize that we inherit their legacy, that those things were done by our ancestors.

That can feel really awful, and it is okay to feel terrible about the past. It was much worse for the people our people did these things to; shame about that might be part of the feeling we might have about whiteness past.

Feeling shame for whiteness present

Then just look out at the world right now. It is not only white people doing shitty things, so if you’re identifying a terrible thing that some racialized person is doing somewhere notice that that’s just another thing that white people tend to do when if we feel bad about whiteness – another exit strategy for white shame.

The ghost of whiteness present can arise when we learn about practically anything happening in the world right now. The triumphalist narrative offered so often in the US and Canadian contexts is that things may’ve been really bad in the past, that bad or misguided people may’ve done bad things in the name of whiteness, but that we’ve moved past all that now and things are all better. Slavery was abolished, wasn’t it? People can all vote, can’t they? And so on. So when we white people perceive a fraction of the racist bullshit happening, sometimes we just can’t believe that things are so bad. Learn about at the percentages of imprisoned people in Canada who are Indigenous or at the Canadian government’s commitment to indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants, or the US government’s imprisonment of Black and Native people, or police murders of Black women and men in both countries, or white vigilantes roaming the border to try to make sure migrants die instead of crossing, or where bombs built in our countries are being dropped, or who is poisoned with the run-off from mining, or a million other things, and see what comes up. Look at the next time an avowedly racist white person kills other people and see what happens. It’s harder for us white people to perceive some of the things that are less obvious to white people about whiteness as it happens right now – preferential hiring, not getting stopped for walking or driving, not having our kids taken away from us, and all sorts of other ways that being white makes our lives easier and smoother.

For a lot of us white people, there’s an urge to reject any connection to any of this, a wish to just not feel bad or responsible. White shame is realizing that we are implicated in and benefit from the harm being done to other people, right now. In the face of that, we might feel powerless and not know what to do.

As I write this, the Unite the Right conference has just happened in Charlottesville. White supremacists are marching in streets all over the continent, openly trying to gather white people in the cause of whiteness. People are being killed for not being white, they are in prison, they are dying because they don’t have a safe place to live. Fascists are marching in the name of white people; the white supremacist world they yearn for exists to benefit white people. And it does benefit white people. It doesn’t matter if we white people say we don’t like it; we still benefit from racism at every scale and in every way.

Over the last twenty years, there’s been vital work to identify and dismantle structures and social relations of white supremacy, to aim at the infrastructures that invisibly make whiteness the lowest difficulty setting, to not fixate on overt or obvious racists. If we’ve focused on structural critiques of whiteness we might be shaken by the rise of outspoken and self-conscious white supremacists. So it’s worth remembering that some of these fascists are coming out of their cracks because they feel threatened. Some of them are emerging because they feel like there’s an opening. The structural work matters as much as ever, and direct action to fight fascism complements that work.

Rejecting the shame of whiteness future

The best thing I know for us white people to do if we feel a terrible feeling about being white, if we feel white shame, is to fight to make this world a different world. When I say that we inherit whiteness and benefit from it, I mean that we may not have chosen it and we may not like it. I mean that we can’t personally reject whiteness, or pretend not to be white. Wanting to not be white is a response to white shame. Since whiteness is a relationship, not something we personally have, we can’t personally take it off, put it down, or divest from it. White shame shows us that even if we’re not personally responsible for something, we have a responsibility to do something. All we can do if we recognize the shamefulness of whiteness is change the world.

How we do that work will depend a lot on where we live and what capacities we have. I have thought about what remains for us in what used to be called Race Traitor politics, and their slogan, “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Some of the time, those politics expressed themselves in personal expressions or disruptions of white privilege, and I remain unconvinced that attempts at individual refusals will do much to transform this shameful. But, sparked by conversation with my friend Angus Maguire, I’ve been reflecting again about how treason might be vital for building collective movements for liberation.

If we can acknowledge the shameworthy histories we inherit, if we can see how they live in the present, we can ask ourselves: How can I reject this shameful world? How can I make a future that is different from this present? Instead of avoiding or denying how bad things are and how we white people benefit from them, we can name the feeling we’re having as shame. We can refuse to let our complicity and the ways we fuck up shut us down. We can fight fascism, we can stand with people targeted by racists, we can help transform our collective reality.

 

 

Whiteness as method in philosophy

Ah, whiteness and philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking about the racialized boundaries of the discipline a long time ago – this thing I wrote came out seven years ago and I still agree with it:

“Significant occlusions structure philosophy as a discipline. They are not limited to racialized abstractions; partitioned social ontologies have also to do with ability and disability, heteronormativity, and gender formation – among others. But all of these categories are racialized, and in ways that bear the marks of the reproduction of whiteness specifically. Given the operations through which the specificity of white racial formation is made to stand in for general, universal experience, it is no surprise that work on race is rarely considered properly philosophical. Nor is it a surprise that it is so very possible to do work on subjects that are in fact deeply racialized – like individual liberty or citizenship – as though race had nothing to do with the question. This topical racialization extends, I would argue, into more structural characteristics of the whiteness of philosophy: only some questions will be possible to ask and only some methods understood as legitimate ways forward. And all of this will help to determine who ends up practicing philosophy – which subjects subsist in the discipline as philosophers.”

A politics of imperfection, a politics of responsibility.

The kind folks over at the University of Minnesota Press blog posted this short piece, and I’m reproducing it here, too.

Lately it seems like every day brings a new bad thing for anyone not invested in white supremacy and capitalism. As the tweet went: “First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor people, intellectuals, and scientists and then it was Wednesday.” And every day, I become more convinced that a politics based on purity will let us down. Let me explain.

Saturday, January 28, 2017, was early in the litany of bad. That weekend thousands of people converged on airports around the United States to protest the effects of an executive order imposing a ban on travel from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Trump signed that order on Friday and by Saturday there were refugees as well as people with green cards from these countries arriving at US airports. They were then held in custody and denied access to lawyers. I was at the manifestation at the San Francisco airport. I have been at many protests, encampments, and manifestations over the last twenty years, and this one stands out; it was tremendously moving and powerful.

On the Facebook event page for the protest, someone posted: “So where was this when Obama signed a ban in 2011 against Iraqi’s and again in 2015 when he put a ban on Muslims?? Hypocrisy at its finest!!” Later he clarified that he didn’t actually care about the travel ban (he thought it was a good move for the US to protect its borders and not let anyone in). He was just pointing out the hypocrisy of protesting Trump’s policies without having had an equally explosive and massive resistance to Obama’s policies.

Conservatives, particularly the subspecies whose main political work is trolling people on the Internet, are fond of this line of critique. It can take the form that it did here, calling hypocrisy on people who now are saying something when they did not raise a protest in the past. It also takes the form of pointing out inconsistencies, as when trolls tweeted to a friend that she could not both oppose human-fueled global warming and drive her car. Or it could be arguing that if someone benefits from something they cannot protest it (as when people say that it is impossible to criticize the US military and enjoy the supposed peace that it is supposedly protecting). Conservatives also use this approach in response to people opposing bigots speaking on university campus—if we care about free speech, surely we mean free speech for everyone, and “everyone” definitely includes people who think that (as the T-shirts put it) “Feminism Is Cancer.” Each of these criticisms deploys what we can call “purity politics”: because the person expressing the desire for another world is complicit or compromised, they are supposed to give up. Conservatives use purity politics to try to close down critique and action.

Recognizing our involvement in and complicity with things we think are wrong, fully understanding the weight of wrongdoing in the history we inherit, or understanding the harms that have come from our failure to act can feel quite awful. The right uses purity politics against the left because we’re the ones who respond to being implicated in doing harm. They’re correct that we are involved in the very things that we want to stop, but they’re wrong to think that being compromised means we should stop protesting. If we stop working against them, terrible things simply continue. If we are to be effective, we who want to have a world in which many beings and ecosystems can flourish, we should reject purity for purely tactical reasons—it demobilizes us.

But we should resist purity politics for deeper reasons, too. Purity has long been the domain of the racist, nativist, and eugenicist right. It has been the technology through which laws about miscegenation were formulated, and it’s still the emotional hinge on which today’s alt-right argues that the white race is dying. Purity of the nation has been the rallying cry for tightening borders against the free movement of people; it is the engine that drives vigilante border patrols and murderous refugee policies. Purity of the species has been the scalpel that forcibly sterilizes disabled people, and that continues to support policy based on the idea that disabled lives are not worth living.

We do better to aim for a politics of imperfection. If we do not fit the mold of perfection—if we’re disabled, sick, young, old, not working, not productive—we are definitely beings who offer care, help, solidarity, and presence to the world. If we’ve failed to help in the past, if things we do are implicated in harm, if we benefit from something that harms others, or if we accord only some people access to a podium, we can still be of benefit to this world. Even people who have harmed others or the world, whose ancestors owned slaves, whose current government is actively pursuing genocidal colonial policies, who regularly make mistakes—even we can be useful.

But how to unfurl a politics that holds our imperfections? I suggest taking up a “politics of responsibility,” a concept from social movement scholar Gary Kinsman. He defines this as involving “those of us in oppressing positions recognizing our own implication within and responsibility to actively challenge relations of oppression.” A politics of responsibility recognizes our relative, shifting, and contingent position in social relations of harm and benefit; it enjoins us to look at how we are shaped by our place in history. We can take responsibility for creating futures that radically diverge from that history, seriously engaging that work based on where we are located, listening well to the people, beings, and ecosystems most vulnerable to devastation.

Listening well, taking responsibility, and acting even though we recognize that we can’t be pure is going to be much harder than disengaging would be. Two poems have helped me think about this. Johnetta Elzie co-founded an organization working to end police violence. Her poem “Where were you” addresses itself to people—largely white women—who participated in the enormous protests march the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It asks a lot of questions, and on the surface many of those questions sound like our Facebook troll friend—the last line of the poem ends “We’ve been marching for years — where the hell have all of you been?” But Elzie’s questions are the opposite of trolling. She is calling her listeners in to responsibility for not having been there, asking us to reflect on how we are placed in history, and then inviting us to step up now. She asks,“What happens tomorrow? Will you march with us when we need you most?” Danny Bryck’s poem “If You Could Go Back” likewise calls us in to a politics of responsibility. Drawing on the fact that many of us in the present believe, looking back, that we would resist fascism, racism, and oppression with every fiber of our being, it points to things that are happening now:

“That’s King. And this is Selma. And Berlin. And Jerusalem. And now is when they need you to be brave.”

Let us be imperfect, for we are, but let us be brave too.

The problem with loving whiteness

This was later published as part of a section in Philosophy Today on the book

The problem with loving whiteness

SPEP, October 2015, response to S. Sullivan’s Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

Shannon Sullivan’s work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, was important to my philosophical formation. It has been generative and useful for me to engage and think through this book, particularly as it works through issues and problems that have occupied me for years now. Shannon was also a reader on my first book when it was under evaluation at the press and (to my eternal gratitude) recommended publication. In part, I mention this because it is instructive to remember the hard and unrewarded work that established scholars do for unknown junior writers, and the incredible generosity of that work. In part, it is remarkable because then, as now, Shannon and I differ on some key things about race, racism, and how to dismantle racial oppression; I want to lift up her capacity to promote and value work that she disagrees with.

I attempt here to offer some constructive disagreement in this spirit on matters of mutual care and concern: in general, the abolition of white supremacy and in particular white people’s potential contribution for racial justice movements. I see the general purpose of Author-Meets-Critics sessions as either to explain to audiences who have not encountered a new book what’s in it so that they might engage or to directly engage the arguments and issues the book raises in the context of a collective conversation. Since Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism has already been widely read and reviewed, in this response I take the second approach. I focus here on the key question of whether it is appropriate to love whiteness. Along the way I worry on some side questions of Good White People‘s orientation toward middle-class liberals, approach to history, the politics of citation, and a focus on a Black/white binary in continental United States.

Sullivan begins the book by quoting a critic I hadn’t heard of before reading this book, Lerone Bennett, who wrote “The white liberal and the white supremacist share the same root postulates. They are different in degree, not kind” (Sullivan 2014, 1). Sullivan says that she is “addressing the bulk of white people in the post-Jim Crow United States and other similar white-dominated nations who consider themselves to be non- or anti-racist. These are the white liberals of which Lerone Bennett speaks, the ‘good’ white people whose goodness is marked by their difference from the ‘bad’ white people who are considered responsible for any lingering racism in a progressive, liberal society” (3). I agree absolutely with the view that white liberals are not going to bring about revolutionary transformation in the racial order of this world. But precisely for this reason, I am not sure that the white liberal is the correct subject through which we should to organize our thinking about race; I would like to hear more about why the white liberal is an appropriate organizing figure for thinking about anti-racist struggle.

Further, I am curious about the category of similar white-dominated nations; although I have only deeply engaged racial politics in two nation states, “Canada” and the “US,” it is clear to me that while there are certain commonalities in the way race is lived and governed there are also vital differences. Perhaps the most striking is the difference between an assumed Black/white binary grounded in historical chattel slavery as the central logic for thinking about race, common in US race thinking, versus an overt formation in Canada (and other places) that centers far more on indigeneity, borders, migration, and the management of multiple racialized others. Working through these differences has convinced me of the necessity of understanding and thinking about whiteness as operative outside the US American context, beyond a black-white binary, and in a way that accounts for the founding and ongoing violences of capitalism and colonialism. While chattel slavery has informed many parts of the world, and while anti-Black racism has been necessary to the ways slavery was organized and manifests in contemporary racism, I would love to hear more explanation for this book’s tight focus on the US and on Black/white racial dynamics.

Whiteness, in my view, operates in complex and shifting ways anywhere racialization is happening, and so perhaps it’s a good place to start in thinking about the question of whether we ought to love whiteness. In this book, Sullivan does not spend a lot of time defining whiteness. When she does, it is in expansive ways that raise the question of what it means to love whiteness so defined. She argues that there is “something to being white that being Irish or Italian alone does not capture, and that something is a pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression” (Sullivan 2014, 16). This understanding of whiteness as collective –as constituted by domination, exploitation, and oppression – reminds us that whiteness not something, on Sullivan’s view, that we individually control the effects or the meaning of. For example, she says: “Whiteness is not a club in which a white person can just decide to drop her membership. Whether a white person likes it or not, at this moment in history she is white and she is implicated in the effects of whiteness. How she takes up and lives her complicity in white domination will help determine the quality of her contributions to racial justice movements” (Sullivan 2014, 12). I agree with Sullivan in these characterizations of what defines whiteness.

But she narrows her definition of white supremacy in a way that is curiously out of line with this definition of whiteness. She gives as her reason for this that she is following the 1964 book by Lerone Bennett, writing before much of the rich discussion and argument about how we ought to define white supremacy. As she notes in a parenthetical remark,

(While some contemporary scholars have reappropriated the term white supremacy to refer to systematic racial oppression and privilege, I will continue to use it, as Bennett does, to refer to overt white racism. I accordingly will us white privilege to refer to the seemingly invisible, often unconscious forms of white racism that pervade the United States’ post-Jim Crow era, and white domination and white racism as general terms covering both white supremacy and white privilege) (Sullivan 2014, 4).

Defining racism and white supremacy this way narrows them significantly, making them in effect only overt, conscious, articulated and avowed racist acts and statements. Given Sullivan’s work to argue for the inarticulate, implicit, and habit-based nature of racism, this is surprising. It is not exaggerating to say that the state of the art in whiteness studies, and perhaps indeed in critical race theory, these days understands white supremacy to name the webbing of social relations, institutions, implicit racial understandings, and explicit and implicit personal investments that hold up and stabilize the current organization of racial oppression. Of course, all of these are underlined every time a cop kills a Black person, every time a KKK member burns a cross, every time a teacher says that the white kids are smarter than the kids of color. But white supremacy is much broader, deeper, and more insidious than the Klan, or than overt and obvious expressions of white racism.

The essay (“Tea and Sympathy”) by Bennett that Sullivan cites as what she’s following in thinking of white supremacy as referring to overt white racism, is a hagiographic paean to white abolitionist John Brown, literally comparing him to Jesus. Most people probably know this, but in case: Brown believed himself to embody the wrath of God against the sin of slavery, and advocated for and practiced armed insurrection;[1] he led several raids, killing slave-holders, and was in the end captured in an attempt to take the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry. That raid, and Brown’s subsequent execution, escalated tensions and – it is widely agreed – helped precipitate the Civil War. Bennett says he “was of no color, John Brown, of no race or age.  He was pure passion, pure transcendence.  He was an elemental force like the wind, rain and fire.” Bennett continues:

There was in John Brown a complete identification with the oppressed.  It was his child that a slaveowner was selling; his sister who was being whipped in the field; his wife who was being raped in the gin house.  It was not happening to Negroes; it was happening to him.  Thus it was said that he could not bear to hear the word slave spoken.  At the sound of the word, his body vibrated like the strings of a sensitive violin.  John Brown was a Negro, and it was in this aspect that he suffered.

More than Frederick Douglass, more than any other Negro leader, John Brown suffered with the slave.  “His zeal in the cause of freedom,” Frederick Douglass said, “was infinitely superior to mine.  Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun.  Mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the silent shores of eternity.  I could speak for the slave; John Brown could fight for the slave.  I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for the slave.”

John Brown, fierce terrorist in pursuit of abolition, the religious white man who brought down war on individual slavers, who felt himself biblically called because of his position as a beneficiary of whiteness to dismantle chattel slavery, did not identify as Black. But surely this litany is a kind of white liberal dream – to have Frederick Douglass say that your zeal is infinitely superior to his? – to be framed as actually becoming Black. If Brown is Bennett’s model of the white non-liberal, and he is, and Sullivan is taking Bennett’s account as one ground for what it is to reject white liberalism, and she is, I worry about what models are open to us if we try to avoid being the “good white people” Sullivan argues against – white liberals who dump on white trash, preach colorblindness, abjure our white ancestors, and feel bad all the time and in all the wrong ways.

For sure, John Brown was not a good white liberal; he offered more than the tea and sympathy referenced in Bennett’s essay. But Sullivan does not explicate the implications of this citation. More than a critique of the white liberal, Bennett’s essay is an invocation to behave otherwise; to be like John Brown. But I do not think that Sullivan would go along with the presumption that we become no longer white through taking direct action against racist institutions and practices, nor, perhaps, with the injunction to take up arms against racism. And it seems to me that there is significant scope between nervous white liberals, always trying to show that someone else is bad and that we are good, and setting up armed raids on the overt expressions of racism such as chattel slavery. While I do see armed collective uprisings, of the form of John Brown’s, or the Black Panthers’, as transformative of the racial order, they certainly don’t organize themselves around loving whiteness. So let me turn then to the central argument of the book: that white people should love our whiteness.

Sullivan writes:

Love can be thought of as an affect that binds a person to that which she loves, and in that way love can counter the distancing tendencies that many good white people have toward their whiteness. I will argue that rather than try to create distance between themselves and their racial identity, white people need a closer, more intimate relationship with it if they are going to be effective in racial justice movements. Rather than try to flee their whiteness, white people need to embrace it more tightly. Rather than despise their whiteness, white people need to learn to love it (9).

Reading this quote – and this happened for me often in reading this book– gives me some conceptual whiplash; I agree, and agree, and then really really disagree. So: definitely, we white people need to not disavow our whiteness if we want to be of any use at all in fighting racial oppression – Sullivan’s arguments about the wrongs of trashing working-class white people are spot-on, as is her analysis of why we oughtn’t pursue supposed “color-blindness,” entirely aside from its ableist connotations.

But there is a difference that makes a difference between not distancing ourselves from our racialization as white and loving whiteness. There is a difference, that is, between binding ourselves as white people to the work of fighting racial oppression and binding ourselves to whiteness. My friend Clare Bayard is one of the founders of the Catalyst Project, an organization doing political education with white people aimed at building multiracial movements for collective liberation. Bayard commented to me about the above quote: “You don’t have to love whiteness (on what basis would that even make sense?) to love people who are racialized as white.” This is basically my response to Sullivan’s argument, and I could actually stop here. Being an academic, though, I’ll elaborate. Recalling Sullivan’s own definition of whiteness as a pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression, I do not find it worthy of my love. I remain, though, fiercely committed to white people, both as potential agents of change and as in themselves.

Sullivan’s argument for why we white people should learn to love whiteness has two parts. She gives first a critique of the role of negative affect in theory and practice and then an articulation of the uses of critical love.

Sullivan argues that negative affect, in general, impoverishes and enervates us (134), and robs a person of the “vitality and energy it will take to make a sustained kind of change in herself or the world. The experience of a shrunken self doesn’t motivate beneficial action. It kills it” (135). Understanding affect as transactional and contagious (123), Sullivan sees affects that bring us down as a collective problem. She argues especially against the affects of white guilt, white shame, and white race traitor identification. Sullivan:

As I will argue, white people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of negative affects such as greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, destructive anger, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities built out of their affects and emotions. Their effect is to exhaust or diminish white people’s spiritual energies, leaving them weak and powerless, like a plant that is too sickly to put out new shoots and effectively begins to die. This sickliness would seem to make white people innocuous, but the result tends to be the exact opposite. As we will see especially in the case of shame, people constituted by negative affects tend to be too psychosomatically depleted to do much that is active and yet extremely dangerous because they resents [sic] others’ liveliness and health and so try to destroy them (121).

A bit later, she argues “Cultivating the negative affect of shame on the part of white people – perhaps especially because they tend to be positioned at the top of racial/social hierarchies – is misguided because it will tend to produce destructively angry white people who have malevolent intentions toward people of color and who will act with hostility toward them (as well as toward themselves)”(136). So: On this account negative affect harms white people, simultaneously weakening and strengthening us; shame is particularly worrying.

This is the one place I want to respond directly to the critique of my work, because Sullivan correctly cites me as a proponent of white shame. She misrecognizes a key piece of my argument, though: I (and others) do not recommend shame as a thing to cultivate – rather, when it arises, I recommend not trying to flee it or tamp it down, but rather to recognize that it’s an appropriate thing to feel bad about how the world, perhaps without our consent but to our benefit, harms others. The only way that a fruitful kind of negative affect arises, I argue, is in circumstances of solidarity work – and, as I say in my book, negative affect doesn’t all by itself motivate action. I believe that others who embrace the potential for shame, in particular, are likewise understanding it politically and in the context of collective action for changed worlds. So, if you follow the kind of account I give some of the key dangers Sullivan identifies in negative affect are transmuted. They move from immobilization to movement, from a desire for purity and clearness into an understanding of the necessity of imperfection and impurity as a ground for action. As I and others have argued, and based our practice around, avoiding negative affect generates more harm than it solves. Psychoanalytically, we could say that the inability to work through the inheritances that have come to us without saying and that go without saying but that we still experience intensifies their disavowed effects on our affects. This is the danger of refusing to meet, with care and compassion, how bad we feel about how bad things really, really are. That we experience shame about the effects of racialization is not necessarily the problem; how we respond to that experience is, in general, a problem. That so many of us white people have no way to hold and work through our experience of benefiting in extraordinary and ordinary ways from the immiseration and harm done to people of color in this world makes that problem harder to work with.

Sullivan’s arguments against shame are grounded in her reading of some key psychologists – ironically for Good White People’s project, many of whom actively recommend cultivating guilt instead of shame, which she also rejects. It is vital to remember that these psychologists are not political, or thinking politically about affect. Their work focuses on helping individuals, as so much clinical psychological practice does; it is not sociological or philosophical, and it definitely does not express sharp critical race theory. And from my reading of them, they do not have rich ways to approach the political and collective content and context of the affects they attempt to investigate. I believe their limitations are in part grounded in methodology – how it’s possible to study things within their discipline – but also it is a theoretical and political inheritance – what it’s possible to study within their discipline. Given Sullivan’s commitments to Laplanche in other parts of the book, I wonder here about her citational reliance on conventional psychology.

Again: the content and context of political affects matter. Take for example Sullivan’s discussion of white treason as exemplified by Mab Segrest’s important Memoir of a Race Traitor. Sullivan writes:

Challenging dominant ideas of whiteness does not have to be interpreted or experienced as an act of treason (which is not to say that Klan members won’t still see it that way). A more satisfactory solution to Segrest’s dilemma about how to love her racist family and fight against racism is for feminists, critical philosophers of race, and other white allies to set aside the notion of betrayal as the primary motivation for work against white domination and as the main component of a white identity grounded in racial justice (144-5).

But I disagree that Segrest sees herself as in a dilemma, nor does she see betrayal as her primary motivation for the work she does; she says “It’s not my people, it’s the idea of race I am betraying. It’s taken me a while to get the distinction” (Segrest 4). And, later: “There is a truth I am desperate to make you understand: race is not the same as family. In fact, ‘race’ betrays family, if family does not betray ‘race’” (102). When she investigates her family’s complicity in and active support for racial oppression, she frames herself as choosing, in her words “justice? community? humanity? the glimpse that we are all one organism…? After all these pages, the language for it escapes me still. But it calls me forward, and I come, with a clearer courage to change the things that we can change” (174, italics in original). Ultimately, Sullivan reframes what Segrest embraces as betrayal as instead a form of critical love. It is not clear to me that this reframing is necessary; on my reading, betraying race is, for Segrest, choosing that ineffable call toward a different world – betrayal of this sort already is a kind of love. In her chapter “On Being White and Other Lies: A History of Racism in the United States,” Segrest quotes James Baldwin, speaking in the film The Price of the Ticket: “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” She says “it is only through acquiring a consciousness of racist consciousness (a necessary corollary to anti-racist practice) that we as white people will ever have any other community than the community of the lie” (226). Again: It matters what and how we betray; context and content matter.

So, finally, let me look more closely at the content and context of how Sullivan argues we ought to love whiteness. She does not shy away from addressing possible reductios, particularly in her arguments that we should “understand and respect” instead of “condemn and resent” white slaveholding ancestors (82). The chapter on white slaveholding ancestors constellates Sullivan’s paradigmatic focus on the founding narrative of Black/white binaries as the central racial question, focusing as well on individual and overt white racism in ways consonant with her narrow definition of white supremacism. She argues:

For people concerned about racial justice to unilaterally exclude white supremacists – and I’m thinking here of middle-class white people in particular – is for them to reenact the dehumanizing and destructive marginalization that white supremacists inflict upon people of color. It is to engage in a repetition compulsion that suggests our society has only scarcely begun to deal with its traumatic history of racism and white domination. That history is not past, and one of its current manifestations is white middle-class abjection of white supremacists and other white people (46).

I agree that history is not past, that it matters very much whether and how we beneficiaries of racial oppression hold and respond to traumatic histories, and that we have scarcely begun that process. And when someone like Dylann Roof aimed to ignite a race war when he killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June, we perhaps do see an example of a racist repetition compulsion that perpetuates trauma and violence. But I would contest the claim that to “unilaterally exclude white supremacists” is “to reenact the dehumanizing and destructive marginalization that white supremacists inflict upon people of color.” White supremacism in its expanded sense – not limited to the Dylann Roofs and George Zimmermans of the world – is far more destructive to people of color than any white anti-racist exclusion of white supremacists.

When Sullivan advocates for loving whiteness and white supremacists, she seems to reach to find something salvageable in their thinking. Relying on the Southern historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Sullivan argues that white slaveholders are lovable because they expressed care for the white working class in the North.

Operating with mixed motives and often despicable intentions, white slaveholders nonetheless insisted that the needs of the white working classes be taken into consideration by those who governed a society. The propertied class of white people should not dismiss the interests of pooper whites, who were forced to sell the only thing they owned, their labor. The personal subsistence and security of all members of a society, including the non-laboring young, elderly, and ill, should be its first priority, and only then should it aim for material progress and economic profit. (81)

Another side note on citation practice: Fox-Genovese and Genovese are much more controversial within the discipline of history than would be evident through a quick reading of Good White People; they have done extensive work in pre-Civil War history that is frequently understood in the field as quite conservative, religious (and therefore imputed to be somewhat on-side with a Biblical reading, which they cite, that held that socialism was wrong but slavery sanctioned), and unsympathetic to shifts in the field toward a “history from below” approach that focuses on voices other than Great Men.

Sullivan cites as well George Fitzhugh in support of this claim that white supremacists in the antebellum era supported slavery because they saw it as the best way to create a good human society. Indeed, Fitzhugh does assert this. He writes:

At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor. We have but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses. We produce enough of the comforts and necessaries of life for a population three or four times as numerous as ours. We are wholly exempt from the torrent of pauperism, crime, agrarianism, and infidelity which Europe is pouring from her jails and alms houses on the already crowded North. Population increases slowly, wealth rapidly.

It is this vision of a flourishing South which Fitzhugh contrasts to the depredations of capitalism in the non-slaveholding North, and it is this that he asserts (as Sullivan discusses) is worth defending against the individualizing and monetizing imperative of wage labor. (Roof says a similar thing. His manifesto quotes the film Hizaki: “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.”)

If we take Fitzhugh seriously in these words, I believe we must take him seriously in his other statements about enslaved Black people. In the same document Sullivan quotes about his care for the wage laborer, Fitzhugh argues about the enslaved:

He is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian…The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery…We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro’s providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.

I believe that slaveowners, white and otherwise, were not simply enthralled by their own rhetoric – or at least that some of the more vomit-worth claims Fitzhugh makes were quite clearly false to people of the time. Consider his claim, that:

The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon.

Slaveholders were frequently acting as they did and advocating as they did out of a clear-eyed, though perhaps ideologically inflected, commitment to wealth, alongside a particular reading of the Bible. Racists today have some of the same characteristics. So if we’re going to have a class analysis of white supremacy, let’s be thoroughgoing in our materialist analysis of history. Whiteness has in fact been a site for cross-class racist solidarity, explicitly deployed to break the cross-racial radical class solidarity that has repeatedly threatened capitalist and owning-class interests. I cannot love Fitzhugh’s white supremacist views or actions, just as I cannot love Dylann Roof’s white supremacist views or actions. Whiteness, qua pattern of domination, exploitation, and oppression, does not deserve our love. White people, on the other hand, certainly deserve all the critical love Sullivan invokes.

When Sullivan talks about the kind of love she advocates – at least when she is not referencing putatively redemptive views of white slaveholding ancestors – she herself articulates the complexity, mixed-ness, hard-feeling, and hard work associated with critical love. At the start of the book, she says:

Love is an emotion, but not always in the sense of being a pleasant sentiment. It can be and often is discontent, especially with situations, actions, and passions that separate people from one another, for example, through oppression and domination. A white person’s loving herself as a white person means her critically caring enough about the effects whiteness has in the world to make it something different and better than what it is today (10).

And at the end:

Dissenting with whiteness out of love means a white person’s being willing to risk complicity with white privilege and white supremacy – the dominant meanings and effects of whiteness to this point – out of a loving relationship with oneself (161).

I agree with Sullivan that we ought to radically shift our practices around whiteness, and that love is a central, complex, demanding practice for such a shift. But the love that I hold out for encompasses and cares for us white people as a way of working through what it might be for us to resist, refuse, and disrupt whiteness qua social relation of oppression. And at the end, this is perhaps the central tension I see in this work: it remains opaque to me how we might truly love white people and also love whiteness. Whiteness, again qua social relation of oppression (which is what it qua), is precisely the thing that is destroying white people. More importantly, it’s destroying and killing people of color. Even though it is hard and might sometimes feel terrible, hating whiteness and its effects while working for collective liberation, remaining committed to the possibility that white people are worth working with and for, also remains one of the most meaningful and joyful things we can do.

[1] “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”